Many companies package groups of items together for a variety of purposes, such as e-commerce and mail-order companies that package items (e.g., books, CDs, apparel, food, etc.) to be shipped to fulfill orders from customers. A common concern with such packages, referred to herein as “item packages,” involves ensuring the accuracy of the items included in the contents of such packages. Such content accuracy is not only very important for customer retention and goodwill purposes, but also for inventory control, tracking purposes, and the costs associated with inaccurate item contents (e.g., handling customer support calls and item returns for packages shipped to customers). A related problem involves ensuring that appropriate packaging materials are used for such item packages, both to minimize costs and to protect the item contents.
These problems with ensuring the accuracy of item package contents and the use of appropriate packaging materials are made even more difficult in situations in which a company has a very large number of diverse items that may be included in package contents, when the available items can frequently change (e.g., to add new items that become available, as well as to remove discontinued items or items that are otherwise unavailable), when some or all of the available items are provided by third-parties (e.g., third-party sellers), and when the items themselves may change over time (e.g., due to a change in the packaging of a particular item and/or changes in the item itself).
One technique that can be used to attempt to address such problems involves manual review of all packages after the package preparation process is complete. However, such manual review is practical only when the item contents of the packages can be directly observed by the person performing the review, such as when the packages are unsealed and open and/or the packaging material that is used is transparent. Moreover, even in those circumstances, such manual review is extremely costly and does not ensure that manually verified open packages do not have subsequent changes to the package contents. Furthermore, manual review techniques are prone to errors.
A similar technique to manual review involves tracking the items as they are added to packages as part of the package preparation process, whether performed manually (e.g., via checklists) or automatically (e.g., by scanning bar codes or other identifying information for the items as they are placed in the package). However, such item tracking efforts are also subject to error, and similarly share the problem of ensuring that subsequent changes to package contents do not occur after item tracking is completed. Moreover, even if manual review or item tracking techniques were able to accurately verify the identity of the items in a package's contents as being accurate, such techniques would not typically identify problems that may occur with a particular item in the package contents (e.g., a manufacturing problem with the item, such as a book that is missing a number of pages or a sealed CD case that is missing the actual CD).
Another related technique that has been used in the past is to selectively sample and check a small number of sealed packages that are otherwise ready to be shipped, such as by opening the packages and verifying their item contents. However, such package sampling merely provides an estimate of an overall error rate with the packages rather than identifying and correcting problems with individual packages.
Other prior art systems use weight as part of an automated process for tracking or checking purposes. For example, some prior art systems attempt to verify that an individual item is complete as it is being prepared, such as to weigh a bottle being filled with a liquid to ensure that it has a particular quantity of the liquid or to weigh an item that includes a number of individual pieces to ensure that the quantity of pieces included is correct (e.g., that a medicine bottle has the correct number of pills). Other systems weigh items as part of automated checkout systems, such as at grocery stores. However, such techniques do not weigh completed multi-item packages to ensure that the package contents include the items intended to be included, nor do they consider non-weight parameters of the items. Furthermore, such techniques typically require that all the weights of all the items that could be in the packages be known and available at the time of checking.
More generally, none of these prior techniques automatically handle situations with large numbers of items that can frequently change, nor do they handle variations and changes to individual items in an automated manner. Thus, it would be beneficial to provide techniques for automatically ensuring the accuracy of item package contents and the appropriateness of packaging for such item packages, particularly in environments with changing items.